Where You Came From

These things don’t always work, says Mother. Where do you think your sister came from?

Note to readers: This anonymous essay is a true account, according to the author. It is sexually explicit.

Mother finds condoms in my bedroom. I am 15. Brandishing them menacingly, she informs me, “These things don’t always work. Where do you think your sister came from?”

I eat a mile of pussy. I expect blowjobs.

I ask “what are we doing about birth control?”

I sweat out a few late periods.

I worry over broken condoms.

I have a long relationship with a woman who wears an IUD.

I pause too long on a woman with ovaries blown out in an ectopic pregnancy.

I am a desperate alcoholic, junkie and all around prick.

I sleep with a lot of women in 17 years of single sex:  make love with some, screw a few, and grudge fuck others.

I am treated for numerous types of clap.

I pull out and come in her mouth.

I never knock a woman up.

♦◊♦

I am sober and marry the female AA rookie of the year, from my Sobriety Class, for some bad reasons and some good ones.  I am working hard to make up the time and money wasted on addiction; she’s finishing college and going for her masters.  We are sane, sober, and responsibly planning a future without regrets for our pasts. She is taking the pill.

She is pregnant.

She knows for sure that if she has a baby now, she will never finish school. She has an abortion.

It’s her body.

She swears she is on the pill.

She has another abortion.

I’m a good feminist.

She assures me she is taking her pills.

She schedules a third abortion; on which routine adventure her sister accompanies her.

She has her degree. It is time to make babies we will keep. I am ambivalent; the blush is off the bloom; her insular family and I clash; the sex is lousy and the lovemaking half-hearted. Growing up and commitment are wrapped in my head with staying sober; so I dive into adulthood. I do not have another recovery in me.

We have two babies, Irish twins:  a girl for her, a boy for me.
.
Her mother, faced with a fatal condition, mean and pre-Alzheimer’s cranky, tells her it is time to come clean with me about her past.
The bride tells me about the abortion she didn’t have, the baby she gave up for adoption before we met.

My huevos shrivel remembering my babies blithely aborted while a doctor and his wife raise some douchebag’s bastard.

The stud was her first true love, the football captain who inspired her cheerleading; he knocked her up twice. She aborted the children’s baby. Romeo, whose family disapproved of her, left her at the altar, pregnant with the second fetus, too far along for abortion. I observe, “I fucking hate your mother.  I could have died in my eighties without hearing this story.” I’m sober, nonjudgmental and mature. We move on.

I decide to get a vasectomy.  I’m in therapy, at her urging, and secretly halfway out the door, weighing the mechanics of ending our marriage. I schedule nut surgery for Memorial Day weekend. She’s unready for the finality of no more babies. Having another child is not part of my plan. We will go on the pill, carefully, again.

By July she is pregnant.

I take it as a sign, possibly from God.

Possibly He hates me.

I’m unable to suggest abortion because I fiercely love the two children I finally had.

I ask myself, Am I pussy whipped? Too respectful of women?

No, I’m not.

I’m haunted by the phantom children we aborted and what their lives might have been.

Fifteen years later, it’s a judge who is deciding who’s out the door.

Vintage photo of a stork courtesy of Shutterstock